When he arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in 1995 as director, there were no lack of voices questioning his appointment. He’d previously been at the head of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and specialized in Islamic art. The idea of Glenn Lowry (New York, 70 years old) stepping in to direct Manhattan’s legendary museum, whose radical mission to embrace modern art broke the mold with its 1929 opening, turning it into a vanguard institution, was not an obvious one. But today, three decades and two lavish expansions later, with 200,000 pieces in its collection, the PS1 satellite location in Queens, nearly 2.7 million yearly visitors and having survived 9-11, the Covid pandemic, the 2008 financial crash and the 2021 protests that led to the resignation of chairman Leon Black over his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s difficult to imagine another person who could have successfully weathered so many storms.
The “torpedo” imagined by the MoMA’s first director, Alfred Barr, that laboratory-museum that would constantly renovate its collection, occasionally getting rid of pieces in order to keep its finger on the pulse of contemporary creation, is a very peculiar animal. It has an omnivorous appetite, is criticized for eating up contiguous properties in Midtown, and continues to be a mirror in which many see themselves. The museum has been funded from the start by private donations, and as such, its board of trustees has an important role to play. Its influence and impact is as unavoidable in the contemporary art world as in the universe of museums. Lowry has had the longest tenure as director in the MoMA’s history. A year ago, he announced he would leave his position in September 2025, and after months of rumors and betting, announced this spring that Christophe Cherix, who has worked at the museum since 2007 and is its chief curator of drawings and prints, will be his successor.
A few weeks after that announcement, the director was in Madrid to participate in a conversation moderated by journalist Michael Kimmelman, alongside the director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Miguel Falomir, as part of the NEXT IN Summit organized by Acciona Cultura. Lowry spoke about the expansions he’s overseen, André Malraux’s imaginary museum and the impact of AI. Practical, energetic and as fast-moving as any New Yorker worth their salt, he presents an appearance free of any eccentricity (no Le Corbusier glasses here, nor bright colors or attention-grabbing flair), and his responses stick to an amiable and direct tone, evading any hint of controversy. Before returning to New York, he planned on visiting the Goya frescos in Madrid’s San Antonio de la Florida chapel.
Q. What was your arrival to the MoMA as director like, and what were the primary challenges at that time?
A. There was a search for a new director, and the search firm was tasked with identifying the next generation of leaders in the museum world. Somehow, my name got on that list. It was not on my radar screen to become the director of the Museum of Modern Art, I was very reluctant to even go into the interview process. But the woman who was running the search was an old friend of mine from graduate school, and she said, “Look, you just need to do this.” And I did, and I had such an extraordinarily exciting and engaging conversation with the trustees that I met that I got very excited about the job. I’d been running a very large museum that also had a great deal of modern and contemporary art — I don’t have a PhD in modern art, but I do very much care about it and living artists, and had been working with them while I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario and even before that. I thought it was an interesting problem, to try to lead an institution that was so identified with a certain reading of the 20th century into a new century that was going to be, by definition, very different.
Q. One of the most notable changes over these years is the rise in prices of contemporary art. As director of an institution that can significantly increase the price of an artist’s work, what’s your perspective on that? You have a board of trustees who are also art collectors. How do you balance that out?
A. In the mid to late ‘90s, there was an explosion of interest in museums in general, and in modern and contemporary art. With that came a new generation of collectors and visitors, as well as the recognition that art was being made everywhere in the world. It wasn’t just being made in Paris or New York or Madrid. It was also being made in Shanghai and São Paulo and Rio. The art market adjusted to this new reality. Prices, however, they go up and they go down. The museum world lives in parallel, but not the same space, as the art market.
Q. In parallel?
A. There are darlings of the art market that the museum world is uninterested in, and there are darlings of the museum world that the art market is uninterested in. They’re not identical worlds. Sure, we have members of our board who are important and influential collectors, but the art we collect is the art we want to collect, and that’s generated entirely through curatorial interests, not through board interests.
Q. There’s never any interference?
A. There are many conversations I have with trustees who say, “Why aren’t you interested in this artist?” That’s because it’s an artist they believe in. And sometimes they’re actually right, that we should have been interested in those artists. But the reality is, at least in our system, the collection is a function of curatorial direction. That’s where the beginning and end are: what our curators want to collect, believe in. Sometimes that’s in parallel with our board, but it isn’t always.
Q. The museum has significantly expanded its curatorial departments under your tenure. Latin American art has taken on more relevancy, as well as that of Eastern Europe and other regions. There have also been significant cuts, such as the ones that took place after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Does the key to the museum lie in having the muscle to be able to grow and, at the same time, knowing when to contract?
A. I think that’s exactly right. You want to be able to respond to the times, but not be entirely dependent on the times, right? There’s a dialogue. It was clear to me in the mid-‘90s that the Museum of Modern Art needed to figure out how to work in the world, how to expand its interest and its knowledge about what was happening elsewhere in the world. This was not about creating some kind of pseudo-colonial enterprise, but rather, imagining a way of being engaged with colleagues that was symmetrical in its intellectual relationships. We created a program in relationship with colleagues, artists, curators, scholars, collectors from those areas. The goal is to learn, and if you’re learning, you inevitably come up with ideas that translate into publications, exhibitions, and sometimes, even acquisitions. We started to identify parts of the world where we felt there were either prior connections to the Museum of Modern Art, like Latin America, or parts of the world where we wanted to learn more, like the relationship with the Fluxus community of artists and creators in Asia and Japan, the collective conceptual art in Eastern Europe.
Q. Politics and contemporary art have gone hand in hand since the turn of the 20th century. There’s political art, but there’s also a lot of political readings into what an institution such as MoMA does. And then in another layer on top of that, the scrutiny of the board of trustees as posed by Strike MoMA. How has all this complicated your work as director?
A. If you are privileged enough to work at an institution like the Museum of Modern Art, or any of the great museums in the world, it comes with a set of responsibilities and realities. We serve a large and diverse public and we are always going to be at some crossroads of people’s expectations, aspirations and desires, some of which we will be able to fulfill and many of which we will not. I don’t think of that as being difficult. Yes, I mean, it’s difficult in the moment, but it’s also why we’re there, because we’re meaningful. The fact that protestors around issues of climate change or Israel and Gaza or Epstein or economic inequality feel that a museum is an appropriate location to express their position means that we’re important, that people actually feel invested in what we do and believe that we should hear them and that it is more meaningful to have an action at a museum than someplace else. And I’m not naive, one of the reasons is because you’re going to get a lot of attention if you do an action at a museum that you might not get if you do it somewhere else. It puts that issue into relief. I’m interested by that. It doesn’t mean that we can respond to all of those protests and it doesn’t even mean that those protests make sense at the museum. What does matter is that people feel it makes sense there. Museums are subject to lots of different positions, opinions and pressures. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Q. In 20 years, how would you like to be remembered?
A. I came to the MoMA to work with an incredible staff, and I hope that over my tenure, that staff has only gotten more interesting, more nuanced.
Q. What has been your hardest acquisition, your epic fight?
A. The hardest acquisitions to get through are rarely the most expensive, because most-expensive generally follows the most-known. What is really hard is trying to bring an artist into the collection whose work is utterly unfamiliar, and feels like it’s rubbing people who are familiar with what they believe contemporary art to be in the wrong direction. So they’re some of my proudest acquisitions. I don’t want to give names because that would be inappropriate. But I will tell you that in one week, we looked at an acquisition that was going to cost us close to $20 million, and it went through the acquisition committee almost without comment. And it was a major and fabulous acquisition. Literally two days later, we looked at an acquisition that was going to cost us $5,000 and we spent an hour and a half arguing over it. That was a young artist who was not yet represented in the museum and whose work felt, at the time, so different from anything else we collected. There was a real debate, both among our curators and among our acquisitions committee. In the end we did acquire it, and we went on to build a substantial holding in that artist’s work.
Q. There’s a tension in the art world between exclusivity and accessibility in order to maintain a certain halo, no?
A. I want to get to as many people as possible. I am unabashedly clear that public institutions serve the public. That’s why we exist. And we have to find different ways to serve different publics. There are people who just want to come to the museum and find Van Gogh’s Starry Night. There are other people who want to come and spend hours quietly in front of a work of art, because they’re so familiar with the history of art and with the collection and the museum. They don’t want to be with a lot of other people, they want to have a quiet moment. We have to find different ways of satisfying them.
Q. With the return of Trump to the White House, it’s turning out that many supposedly independent U.S. institutions aren’t entirely that, because they depend in some way on federal funding, or receive tax benefits. Patrons, philanthropists, and donors can also have interests at play. Is this putting independence to the test?
A. I think that we have to define what “independent” means. You are ultimately responsible to someone or something, there’s no such thing as being completely independent. If you operate within a European system, you are responsible generally to a minister of culture, and that minister of culture acts on behalf of the state. You have certain opportunities afforded by that, and certain obligations. In the United States, you are responsible to a board of trustees, and with that comes the same conditions. We don’t actually have to follow any one path, we can chart our own path, provided that the board supports and approves it. But it isn’t like the boards direct. I think that is one of the myths.
Q. What is the most common external misconception about the MoMA?
A. That the museum is not self-critical. We work with a lot of doubt, we are constantly challenging ourselves. There are always deep internal arguments and debates.
Q. Thinking about the job of the director of the MoMA, would you say it is like that of a conductor of an orchestra, a long-haul truck driver with fragile cargo, or a CEO?
A. The conductor is maybe the best analogy at the end of the day. They may have his or her interpretation of a piece of music, but they have to bring the strings along with the winds, along with all the other instruments, in something that is harmonious and whole. Along the way, you encounter all sorts of challenges. It isn’t that I had a good idea or I had a bad idea, it’s that collectively, we were able to shape ideas and then realize them, and then go onto a new set of challenges and problems together. It’s always a collective exercise. It requires a thoughtful and supportive board that can ask you good and thought-provoking questions, and it requires an extraordinarily talented staff that can figure out new and unexpected directions to pursue. If you’re the director, you have the privilege of being between these two spaces and working to knit them together to achieve harmony.
Q. So, more of an orchestra conductor than a CEO?
A. I don’t come out of the business world and I’m not particularly interested in that side of the institution. I am trained in a very academic discipline.
Q. In the soft power era of the United States in the mid-20th century, the MoMA played an important role. Today, the cultural and political influence of the United States is vanishing. Would you agree with that?
A. I think this government appears not to be that interested in the kind of soft power you’re talking about. But many of us have been fortunate enough to work in a very rich and nuanced international ecosystem. I think it’s our responsibility to keep that ecosystem alive and vibrant.
Q. What is modernity today?
A. You can answer that in many ways. If you want to periodize it, we can talk about the fact that modernity was a moment that crystallized around 1900 and is strongly identified with issues of individuality, self-identification, technology, speed. We locate it mostly in the 20th century. If you think about modernity as an idea of perpetual self-renewal and advancing to the future, that you’re always embracing the new, then I think we are in a fascinating moment where competing ideas are being worked out in real time. There’s the rise of ethno-nationalism around the world, which is in response to the perceived ills of globalization that left too many people behind, that didn’t address social, political and cultural issues. You have competing visions of a kind of global idea of an interconnected world and the idea of very localized, nationally identified worlds. Culture is a space in which some of these issues are negotiated and resolved.
Q. In this fight between globalization and ethno-nationalism, do you feel that the museum geared towards identity politics during the last decade?
A. The rise of identity politics is so closely identified with the ways in which ethno-nationalisms — I’d say that in plural — have tried to address the perceived loss of agency among constituents and communities. When you feel disadvantaged, when you feel that somebody else is benefiting at your expense, you very quickly self-identify with your community. The role of societies is to lift everybody up, but it can never be done perfectly and there are always going to be imbalances. But you have to have a vision, and if that vision narrows itself to only those communities that have felt an injustice, we’re going to live in a very narrow world.
Q. The director of the MoMA has a paid apartment on 53rd Street in Manhattan. Where are you moving?
A. That apartment came with a lot of responsibility. The idea was that if you’re going to build a major building project or two, and if you’re going to have to negotiate with your community, you need to be in that community, be part of it and understand its issues. You know, I’ve spent 20 years living in the Museum of Modern Art 24/7. Now I have the opportunity to think about where I’ll live where I don’t have to worry about that. We’ll stay in New York, and we’ll see. It’s an adventure, still to be determined.
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